About Alice by Calvin Trillin

morning, she said that we had to talk about that. She said that the wedding had to go on no matter what and that it couldn’t be about her. She said it had to be the same wedding we had planned—the ceremony in the marble lobby of the Surrogate’s Court building, the dim-sum-parlor reception in Chinatown which Abigail had always wanted, the same speeches and dancing. “No matter what,” she repeated.
    â€œWe don’t have to talk about this,” I said. “We’re going to have the wedding and you’re going to march down the aisle with Abigail and me.”
    â€œYou have to promise now,” she said.
    I managed to nod.
    She got out of the hospital about six hours before the wedding. She did march down the aisle, and she was able to stay late enough at the reception to witness a twenty-minute or so rendition of the hora that left the Chinese waiters staring in amazement. The next day, she sent an e-mail to the group of people I’d been keeping informed of her condition. Most of the first paragraph was in caps: ABIGAIL GOT MARRIED YESTERDAY AND I WAS THERE. I WAS THERE FOR THE WHOLE THING, GOT TO SAY MY TOAST ( QUITE MOVING ) AND EAT CHOCOLATE CAKE AND WATCH BUD ’ S 87 -YEAR-OLD UNCLE JERRY ( WHO MARRIED SARAH AND ALEX IN MALIBU LAST JUNE ) DANCE HIS ASS OFF WITH ALICE WATERS, WHO HAD BROUGHT ME ROSES FROM HER GARDEN IN BERKELEY. Toward the end of the e-mail, she said she was safe at home, in the Village, eating comfort food and about to watch
The Sopranos
and an A. R. Gurney play on television. She closed by saying, “Life doesn’t get much better than this.”
    Four months later, speaking at Alice’s memorial service, Sarah said she thought that Alice had toughed it out until she was sure her girls had married the sort of husbands she considered good for the long haul. “I know my mom’s main goal in life was to protect my sister, my father, and me,” Sarah said. “She wanted to protect us from worry, from sadness, from loneliness—things her parents had not been able to protect her from.” She ended by saying, “Mom, I know you’re listening somewhere, waiting patiently to hear me say these words: You were the coolest girl I ever knew.”
    A week and a half before, Alice had died of cardiac arrest. For a while, she had seemed to be recuperating—we were able to spend the summer in Nova Scotia this time—but in late August she began to feel weaker. She died while waiting in the heart-failure unit of Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital to see if she would be eligible for a heart transplant. The doctors said that her heart had been destroyed by radiation. In other words, you could say that she died of the treatment rather than the disease. Presumably, though, it was also the treatment that, against horrifying odds, gave her twenty-five years of life. I know what Alice, the incorrigible and ridiculous optimist, would have said about a deal that allowed her to see her girls grow up: “Twenty-five years! I’m so lucky!” I try to think of it in those terms, too. Some days I can and some days I can’t.

Read on for an excerpt from Calvin Trillin’s
    Quite Enough of Calvin Trillin

    Chubby
    It’s common these days for memoirs of childhood to concentrate on some dark secret within the author’s ostensibly happy family. It’s not just common; it’s pretty much mandatory. Memoir in America is an atrocity arms race. A memoir that reveals incest is trumped by one that reveals bestiality, and that, in turn, is driven from the bestseller list by one that reveals incestuous bestiality.
    When I went into the memoir game, I knew I was working at a horrific disadvantage: As much as I would hate this getting around in literary circles in New York, the fact is that I had a happy childhood. At times, I’ve imagined how embarrassing this background would be if I found myself discussing childhoods with other